


done too much of some things (not enough of others)

by 40millionyears



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dialogue Heavy, Gen, M/M, Season/Series 02, Soulmates, in this house we don't recognise Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-14 18:06:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17513363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/40millionyears/pseuds/40millionyears
Summary: "Jianyu's a straight-up hottie, he's got those hunger-cheekbones, you know, and he doesn't talk so he's never gonna correct your pronunciation or tell you not to send your super annoying co-worker a virus-infested email. Why wouldn't you be into him?"or, there were 802 versions of michael's neighborhood, and chidi and jason were definitely thrown together as soulmates in one of them.





	done too much of some things (not enough of others)

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this post](http://babedur.tumblr.com/post/177756524981) by [babedur](http://babedur.tumblr.com) on tumblr. 
> 
> title from the cat empire's 'protons, neutrons, electrons'.

Chidi’s not an idiot. Chidi dedicated his entire life on Earth to not being an idiot, to pursuing the fundamental truths of the universe and understanding the intricacies of human morality and a lot of other abstract intellectual things.  
  
Chidi’s life on Earth is over, though, and so far the other side of things is really not what he’d been expecting.  
  
Michael’s at his door, genial and natty, the afternoon sun making his white linen suit glow like a full-body halo. There’s a man standing just behind him, fine-featured and dark-haired and wearing a simple cream robe. Chidi vaguely remembers seeing him at the neighborhood meeting, and again at Tahani’s welcome party.  
  
“Chidi, this is very exciting. I want you to meet your soulmate, Jianyu,” Michael says warmly, ushering the man gently inside. “Now, Jianyu is a Taiwanese monk. He obeyed a strict code of silence in life, and he has indicated that he would like to maintain that here. But I’m sure the two of you will find plenty of ways to get along.”  
  
“My… soulmate. This is my soulmate,” he repeats, tripping over the word. He’s not an idiot, but in the moment, he can’t get the sentence to add up to meaning. “Oh, you mean, like, a platonic soulmate? And not Platonic, like Plato and the halves and the wandering, but small-p platonic. Friends. You mean friends?”  
  
Michael just smiles enigmatically, and Chidi’s stomach does a somersault. Whatever the fundamental truths of the afterlife were, they were throwing him for a loop.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
(Jason, on the other hand… well, the jury’s still out. Thinking too much or for too long makes his brain feel like a slinky, so he tends not to. He is street-smart enough to recognise a lifeline when he sees one, though; when the tall guy in the dope suit asks him if he wants to keep his vow of silence, he just nods, even though he has no idea what’s going on. Episodes of Punk’d only went for about half an hour, so whatever weird prank show this is, he figures he can last at least that long.)  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Eleanor is a miniature tornado of ethical diceyness and stolen shrimp and mistaken identities, spinning around something real and genuine underneath it all. She whirls into Chidi’s afterlife and completely upends the peaceful thesis-writing eternity he’d envisioned.  
  
“I have to help her, right?” He’s talking more to himself than anything else as he paces around his small kitchen, not really in need of an audience, but Jianyu is listening intently from his perch on a bar stool. “I mean, I don’t want to lie to Michael. I don’t want to lie to anyone, and I can’t tell her to lie, either. Buuuuut, maybe she can improve. Maybe moral virtue really can be learned. So, does that mean there’s a moral imperative to help her? Do I have a greater obligation to the community? What if it’s all a test?” His voice rises as each question tumbles frantically, unanswered, after the next.  
  
Jianyu just gazes at him, his face serene, and gives a tiny nod. He comes around the kitchen counter, standing so that his legs are bracketing Chidi’s knees, and places both his hands on Chidi’s chest. His palms are warm and feel heavier than they should be, a calming weight that seems to slow Chidi’s heart. For the first time since he got to the Good Place, Chidi feels grounded. Certain.  
  
“Oh,” he says. “Okay. You’re right. I’ll help her.”  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
“Janet?” Chidi calls, and she blips into existence in front of him.  
  
“Hi there!”  
  
“Janet, I just want to check. Again. The way soulmates work here. They don’t have to be romantic, right?”  
  
“That’s right!” she confirms, beaming at him. Her face is a gold star made into (not) human expression. “Soulmates in the Good Place can be romantic, or platonic, or even spiritual.”  
  
“But how do you, you know, _know._ What, uh, what kind of soulmates you are?”  
  
She tilts her head to the side and looks at him in confusion. “You just… know,” she says slowly. “It’s not something you have to figure out. It’s just there inside of you. You know.”  
  
Chidi’s not an idiot. He’s just not immediately sure, the way that everyone else seems to be _._  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
He finds things to distract himself. Eleanor needs ethics lessons and guidance and a morality transplant, probably, and he constructs elaborate teaching plans designed to occupy as much of his time and brain as possible. There’s also the tiny matter of her eternal damnation (and possibly his) if either of them mess up, which takes up a nice chunk of his worrying capacity.  
  
He returns home one morning, coffees and new chalk in hand, to find his teaching board pushed aside and Eleanor sprawled on his small sofa watching an NFL game.  
  
“You like football?” he asks, surprised. She’d never struck him as being interested in sports, mostly because she’d once called them ‘a waste of prime reality TV real estate.’  
  
“I mean, I’ll watch anything where beefy guys rail on each other while wearing tights. Or while not wearing tights. But it was just on when I got here and I couldn’t find the remote,” she says with a shrug. “I figured you were a secret fan.”  
  
“Never even seen a game,” Chidi says, pointedly handing her the remote from where it had been sitting on the coffee table. Directly in front of her.  
  
“Fine, I couldn’t be bothered to reach for the remote,” she admits, rolling her eyes.  
  
For a minute he could swear he hears a gasp from the rock garden outside, a fleeting sharp breath, but when he looks out, Jianyu is sitting as silently as ever.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
He’s starting to feel less certain, now, when Jianyu does the hands-on-chest thing. Less grounded, and more… overwhelmed with the sensation of boundless possibility.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
“Are you seriously telling me that you’re just now, in heaven, in the afterlife, realising that you might also be into dudes?” Eleanor cackles. Her face is a caricature of scandalised joy and she hits him on the shoulder in delight. Hard. For a tiny person, her punch packs a lot of power.  
  
“No… maybe?” he says, rubbing at the smarting skin and wondering if he could bruise in heaven. “I don’t know. It’s just… this whole male soulmate thing has caught me off guard. I only ever had girlfriends, and not even many of those. I don’t even know if there’s a physical… element. It’s just a feeling, that I can’t explain, and it’s making my stomach ache.”  
  
They’d abandoned that day’s lesson forty minutes into a discussion on Stoicism, which had devolved into Chidi comparing Buddhist teachings to the Stoics and subsequently freaking out, and Eleanor trying to fling rubber bands from an increasing distance into Jianyu’s singing bowl. And he and Eleanor are friends now, he guesses, actual friends who care about each other, and she’s got enough of her own weird-horny shirt going on to be mostly non-judgemental about his.  He can talk to her about this.  
  
As if to prove him right, Eleanor shrugs. “Okay, and? It’s not that big of a deal, man. He is your soulmate, after all. Pretty sure you’re supposed to feel something.”  
  
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not even meant to be here and you still got a body-building mailman who can make fart noises with his armpits as your soulmate. Exactly your type.”  
  
“ _One_ of my types,” she corrects peevishly. “Don’t pigeonhole me, nerd. I’ve got lots of types. Plus, Jianyu’s a straight-up hottie, he’s got those hunger-cheekbones, you know, and he doesn’t talk so he’s never gonna correct your pronunciation or tell you not to send your super annoying co-worker a virus-infested email. Why _wouldn’t_ you be into him?”  
  
Chidi finds he doesn’t really have a good answer for that.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
(There are days – lots of days. Most of them, actually – where Jason can barely keep himself from dropping the whole monk thing and just asking Janet to get Chidi some weed. He can’t even imagine how much Chidi’s head must hurt from all the thinking he does, all the time. It must be like a million slinkies going down the stairs all at once in there.  
  
Chidi is nice, though, and smart, and the kitchen is always clean, and he doesn’t seem to mind that Jason can’t answer his crazy endless questions. When he gets too wound up, Jason just puts his hands on Chidi’s chest, the way a nice nurse had done to him once, and he calms down. So even though Jason gets a little bored sometimes, of pretending to be silent and wise and not craving jalapeno poppers, it seems to make Chidi happy. Jason likes when his friends are happy. He’ll just keep watching the Jags on the DL when Chidi’s out, even though all they seem to get here is repeats of the regular NFL channel and he’s seen all the games.  
  
Also, he saw what happened when Eleanor ratted herself out, and he doesn’t really want to have to go back to school.)  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Jianyu had patiently listened to him ramble about the consequentialist rationale behind asking Janet for almond milk that morning, before disappearing and returning with a Good Place-approved carton of the very same (“no heavenly almonds were harmed in the making of this completely ethical beverage”, it read in a cheerful, if slightly on-the-nose, font), handing it to Chidi with a smile. As a result, Chidi barely makes it ten minutes into his lesson plan with Eleanor before derailing. She pretends to be horrified at his “lack of respect for ol’ Tommy Quine-Quine’s place in your syllabus,” a farce which she manages to maintain for approximately fifteen seconds.  
  
“I always wanted a soulmate,” he tells her, once she's finished making fun of him. “I hoped they existed. But I figured it would be someone who would debate philosophy with me, or books, or just talk. Like, at all. And Jianyu must have so much insight into his own cultural understanding and interpretation of ethics. The fact that we can’t talk is driving me insane. But then he just… looks at me! He looks at me all peaceful and wise and it makes me forget what I’m thinking.”  
  
“Okay, sit down, weirdo,” she says, steering him to the uncomfortably small bench that’s somehow the centrepiece of her living room. “Okay. Last week, remember, when you had that giant boner for deontology. You told me that there are some things that are just fundamentally good.  Right? So if you like Jianyu _—_ ”  
  
“I don’t _—_ ” he begins to protest, but she smooshes her hand against his mouth to cut him off.  
  
“ _—_ if you like him, in whatever way, then that’s good. That’s a good feeling, because he’s a good person and so are you. And if something is truly good, no situation is gonna be made worse by it. And you can’t even argue, cause you just taught me that!”  
  
“Well, don’t listen to me, I’m an idiot,” he says, dropping his head into his hands with a groan.  
  
“No you’re not.” She shakes her head, her voice thick with affection. “You’re the smartest person I know.”  
  
“Then how come I can’t figure this out?”  
  
“Just let it be what it is,” she advises, patting him on the back and stealing a huge bite of his scone. “You don’t need to give it a name. There’s no rush. We’re in the Good Place, dude. You’ve got a literal eternity to see what happens.”  
  
“How are you the smart one right now,” he mutters into his splayed palms, and she smiles smugly.  
  
  
  
.  
  


Things start getting _very_ strange. One day, a giant sinkhole opens up in the middle of the town, swallowing two sushi restaurants and some flower beds and a park bench and one very unlucky dog. The fountain in the square starts gushing clam chowder instead of water, before exploding completely and coating half the town in a thick seafood-y glaze. A plague of giant bees terrorises the neighborhood for a week.  
  
(Chidi can’t be one hundred percent sure, but he swears that the bees had teeth.)  
  
They start getting snippy with each other, with Janet temporarily offline, arguing over the smallest things. Tahani offends Eleanor by calling her ‘rustic’, and Eleanor cuts the mansion’s hedges to look like penises as retaliation. It gets harder and harder to keep Eleanor’s secret.   
  
In the middle of all, he has an… intimate dream about Jianyu. He makes the mistake of mentioning it to Eleanor, and she promptly spends three hours recalling for him, in graphic and specific detail, tricks she thinks he could learn from her favorite gay pornography. "Your brain is so horny for him that it's overflowing and now your body is too," she says, with such an authoritative tone that Chidi almost buys it as a scientific explanation.   
  
So it turns out there might be a physical element after all. He still doesn't know what it all means.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
(Everyone is fighting, and the TV is still only showing Jags games from three years ago, and the X-Box in his secret room stopped working and Janet’s not around to fix it. And Chidi's being sad and weird. Michael keeps telling them they’re in heaven, but Jason’s starting to think something’s wrong. )  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
Eleanor gets found out, and Michael brings in a judgemental obelisk to decide her fate, and somehow it’s mystically decided that he has to choose. One of the fundamental truths of the afterlife, apparently, is that it’s completely forked up.  
  
Tahani is yelling at Michael, and Eleanor’s trying to sneakily escape through her sliding door as though she’s forgotten _it’s made of glass and everyone can see her,_ and Chidi’s panicking. He could really use some of that calming Buddhist crap right now, wants the reassuring weight of Jianyu’s hands and whatever other implications come along with them. But Jianyu is still sitting at the very edge of Eleanor’s bench-couch, steadfastly silent, a slight clench in his jaw the only indication that he’s processing the events unfolding.  
  
Then he suddenly stands up, more animated than Chidi’s ever seen him, and he opens his mouth.  
  
  
  
.  
  
  
  
They’re not in the Good Place.  
  
They’re not in the Good Place and Michael has been torturing them all and Jianyu isn’t a monk but a Floridian ex-DJ named Jason Mendoza and it might all be because Chidi hadn’t heard of a mediocre football player with a frankly ridiculous name.  
  
“Jason figured it out? _Jason?”_ Michael exclaims in disbelief, clutching at his side as though the notion physically pains him.   
  
Jianyu isn’t a monk, he isn’t Jianyu, and he isn’t Chidi’s soulmate. That’s okay. It’s not like Chidi had ever found a label for what he _is._ He's not losing anything because it turns out he never had it to begin with, and they're in literal hell so there are bigger things to be upset about, and the twist in his stomach doesn't mean anything.   
  
He nearly makes himself believe it.  
  
_Snap._  

**Author's Note:**

> this was just supposed to be comedic crack, but it took a turn into earnest and a little sad somewhere along the way because I'm not funny. I'm also just amused by the notion that chidi was the soulmate who didn't know blake bortles that jason mentions in 2x03.


End file.
